"I guess it’s fair to say that there were two distinct phases to my life in West Virginia," writes Homer H. Hickam, Jr., in Rocket Boys: A Memoir. "Everything that happened before October 5, 1957 and everything that happened afterward." As it happens, Mr. Hickam’s pivotal moment was shared by millions across the globe; the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1 marked the dawn of the Space Age and sent spasms of disbelief and national self-doubt rippling across the United States. The author’s father flatly dismissed the prospect of Russian technology sailing over Coalwood, West Virginia. "President Eisenhower would never allow such a thing," declared the senior Hickam.

The satellite cast a long shadow over the mining town where Homer and Elsie Hickam were raising Homer Jr. and older brother Jim — mostly in the form of a challenge to American youth to redouble its efforts in mathematics and the sciences. The darkness and tension of the Cold War lent an almost supernatural quality to the feats of rocketry and spaceflight. Four decades later, Hickam remembers, "They [the Soviets] were so walled off to us . . . when you don’t know someone and they’re a mystery to you, you tend sometimes to ascribe superhuman qualities to them."

That fall, the Hickams were getting almost all of their news from Life and Newsweek. The magazines arrived on Wednesdays — and persuaded all that the "Red Moon" was a reality. The author had just turned 14 and liked "Pepsi and Moon Pies." He also really liked biology classmate Dorothy Plunk.

A love of reading — particularly science fiction — and some success at writing short stories distinguished the boy, but those qualities were largely lost on a father obsessed with his responsibilities as Coalwood’s mine superintendent. The fact that "Sonny" seemed ill-suited for a life in and around mining created a painful gulf between the father and his namesake.

As Sputnik augured an era that would pass the mines by, it also inspired the youngest Hickam to begin experimenting with rocket propellants and designs according to models seen in Life. He banded together a group of close friends and formed the Big Creek Missile Agency. As time passed, they would become known, in town and throughout the county, simply as the "rocket boys."

After early mishaps (including the launch of his mother’s rose-garden fence), the rockets began to soar. With better propellants and more sophisticated designs, the Auk series (named after a bird that cannot fly) began reaching heights of a mile and beyond. Auk XXXI, the final flight, would reach an altitude of more than six miles. Its design was the product of painstaking empiricism coupled with hard-won skills in chemistry, calculus, and engineering. For their work, the miners’ sons had won the Gold and Silver medal at the National Science Fair. Then, in the spring of 1960, hundreds gathered at "Cape Coalwood" for the final launch. Among them, for the first and only time, was Homer Sr. He flipped the switch to fire the rocket, and in one shining moment the door was closed on the tensions and confusion which had surrounded the two. Sonny Hickam had finally been given permission to be something other than a mine engineer.

There was another fine moment in that spring of 1960. Junior Senator John Kennedy from Massachusetts came through the county en route to the Democratic nomination. Sonny made it his business to let the candidate know that the United States should go to the moon. Kennedy seemed to take the idea more seriously than the well-wishers gathered that day. It’s an astonishing image, and Hickam plays it beautifully, deadpanning, "well, I really think that Wernher von Braun had more to do with it than I did, but . . . "

Next came four years at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. After graduating in 1964, his rockets took him not to Cape Canaveral and NASA’s triumphs, but to the dark side of the 1960s: service in Vietnam. "I volunteered to go over there. I felt I should go, and I had an ulterior motive: I wanted the experience. I was young and invulnerable, and the war was something I wanted to taste — a crucible to pass through. Once there, it took me about 48 hours to figure out ‘I don’t really want to die over here.’ I didn’t see much that was worth my life or the lives of my men . . ." Hickam finished his tour with a Bronze Star and the Army Commendation Medal and remained with the service as an engineer until 1981.

More than two decades after Sputnik, Hickam was living his boyhood dream. At NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, he began training astronauts for orbit. He worked on many Space Shuttle missions, including the delicate rescue of the Hubble Space Telescope, before leaving the agency earlier this year. The time has been spent establishing an aerospace consultancy and concentrating further on his writing.

"I don’t look for inspiration. If I did, I’d probably never sit down in front of the word processor. The first thing to do is to go ahead and write and not worry too much about the style and format or anything like that. Get the story down and then go back — what I really love is to go back and re-write. I’ve made the mistake of faxing stuff when it was hot off the typewriter, and I’ve always regretted that. Every time."

Well, perhaps not every time. Rocket Boys the book began in 1994 when Hickam received a desperate call from an editor at Smithsonian Air and Space. A few hours and 2,000 words later, Hickam had submitted what amounted to the germ of a book. The hitch: he had to track down 14-year-old Sonny Hickam, his compatriots, supporters — and his father. The intervening years had pulled survivors away as it banished them to the edges of his memory. "Finding the boy’s voice was the real challenge," he says. "It was only when I started writing the book that it really came back to me — how I felt in those days before that last launch at Cape Coalwood . . . I’d have to say that in the intervening years I did not have any issues with Dad, and I don’t think he had any with me. I was quite contented about our relationship. In trying to find the boy’s voice, I had to bring the issue back up and worry it over."

With Rocket Boys in print and a Universal Studios film due shortly, Life magazine has again been arriving at his house — this time for photo shoots.

Meanwhile, as NASA struggles to regain the momentum of its early years, Homer Hickam is "disappointed, but not surprised" by the agency’s focus on Earth orbit at the expense of the moon. "When I spoke to Kennedy, I thought we should go, and I still think we should go." The author has given himself a productive way to "worry it over." Next up: a "techno-thriller" called Back to the Moon.

Christopher Lawrence is a freelance writer based in New York City.

"This wasn’t what I meant to write at all," Bobbie Ann Mason says of her new memoir, Clear Springs. She laughs. "But that’s often true of a work. Usually I don’t know where I’m going at all. I’m just following something."

What Mason followed this time was an urge to recreate her own upbringing and the history of her family, especially her relationship with her mother over several decades. In five sections ranging back and forth from the 1940s into the 1990s, Clear Springs beautifully paints a loving and perceptive portrait of a family’s personalities and fortunes. "I think the questions I was asking are universal questions," Mason says. "The book starts out with the chapter at the pond, and reflecting on a moment of self-awareness, looking at where I’ve been and what I’ve connected to. It’s a way of asking who you are."

About five years ago Mason wrote what is now chapter one as a separate essay. "I didn’t realize I had a book for another year or so. In this case I did have a few years’ worth of interest in family history that got me going. There were all those early chapters about childhood and school and church. I kind of put them in different piles and tried to see what kind of sense I could make out of them. I had to find a way of sorting them all out so that they would cohere so that there would be patterns of them."

Clear Springs is Mason’s first book of autobiographical nonfiction, but it seems an inevitable step. Most of her fiction deals with the area she knows best, rural and suburban Kentucky, where she now lives again after decades in the North. Mason found the experience of writing a memoir fascinating. "I think it’s a natural impulse to want to find some kind of coherence and meaning in your life, to find that it has a narrative, and that there are patterns. There are themes in your life, and themes that connect back to previous generations. You can see where you fit into the puzzle." The image of fitting together puzzle pieces occurs repeatedly in Clear Springs. "Your life starts to make sense, in terms of what you’ve done before and what you’re doing now."

The prose in the new book is slower, more leisurely and meditative, than that of Mason’s fiction. "The characters I write about usually are in the middle of the whirlpool," Mason admits. "They’re racing down the highway. The confusion that the characters in the stories are in — it’s a culture shock. It’s rural people meeting the modern age and getting thrown out."

 One parallel between the fiction and the nonfiction is that Mason thinks of all the real people in Clear Springs as characters. "I think right at the heart of the book, for all the characters," she speculates, "is culture shock. It all happens at World War Two and thereafter. Before that, everything was pretty much the same. For all three generations that I’m writing about, the culture shock is happening almost simultaneously."

Mason has been chronicling this kind of shock for some time. Since her 1982 debut story collection, Shiloh and Other Stories, she has gone on to three novels — In Country, Spence + Lila, and Feather Crowns — and the excellent recent collection Midnight Madness. She is also writing the volume on Elvis Presley for the new Penguin Lives series of short biographies. One of the many pleasures in Clear Springs is Mason’s inclusion of snippets of the first stories she wrote, youthful imitations of the girls’ detective stories she so loved, which later resulted in her charming (and recently reissued) book The Girl Sleuths.

Considering her scholarly interests, evident in her book on Nabokov’s nature imagery, Mason’s style is surprisingly straightforward, never tricksy, seldom particularly allusive. But like Nabokov in his own autobiography, she approaches facts with the tools of an artist: "It’s awfully hard working with facts — or even what you remember as facts. I had so much trouble writing this book because I had to be faithful to what I knew to be fact, and yet I was trying to write something that in many ways was like fiction. But I couldn’t just haul off and make up things."

Like most memoirs, Clear Springs returns again and again to the question of the accuracy and potency of memories. "I realized that your memories over time are really lost, or they’re transformed," Mason says. "They become memories of memories, and you lose sight of the original. And finally there are a lot of things you remember that you can’t prove really happened, and there are a lot of things you don’t remember that did happen."

Out of her memories Mason brings to life the finely graded social distinctions which would be invisible to outsiders, but which anchor and define the members of a group, like the hierarchies in the world of Proust or Tolstoy. For example, Mason’s father treated her mother like a country girl, and his family made her feel inferior because she married slightly above her station.

To the question of what’s next for Bobbie Ann Mason, she gives some thought and responds slowly. "I think I want to turn a corner and go in a different direction. I don’t know what that will be. Well, I want to write short stories. I don’t know what they’ll be like, but I think they’ll be different."

Clear Springs ends in October of 1996, with a masterful chapter in which Mason herself does not appear. With all of her novelist’s talents she recreates an event her mother described to her, in which the elderly woman falls into a pond while trying to catch a fish. It’s a simple scene, barely an anecdote, that Mason somehow leaves resonating with significance and passion — and, quietly, implicitly, with her profound love for her mother.

There’s a fine moment in Clear Springs when Mason and her young husband begin their first garden. It nicely sums up her tone and symbolism in this book: "When I plunged my hands into the black New England soil, I felt I was touching a rich nourishment that I hadn’t had since I was a small child. It had been years since I helped Mama in the garden. Yet the feel of dirt seemed so familiar. This was real. It was true. I wheeled around and faced home."

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).